Also known as: USRP B210, B210, AD9361 SDR
The USRP B210 is a wideband SDR transceiver from Ettus Research built around the Analog Devices AD9361 RFIC. It covers 70 MHz – 6 GHz continuous, with up to 56 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, two coherent receive and two transmit channels (2x2 MIMO), and full-duplex TX/RX over USB 3.0.1 Because the AD9361 does most of the work, functionally-identical low-cost clones of the same reference design are widely sold — and for receive-only monitoring they behave essentially the same as the original.
Overview
Where an Airspy or HydraSDR is a tuned receive dongle, the B210 is a full transceiver: two RX and two TX chains, wide capture, and the UHD driver stack. For a scanning workload its draw is the wide instantaneous bandwidth — comfortably enough to hold an entire trunked system’s control and voice channels inside one capture — and the coherent second receiver, useful for direction finding or diversity. The trade-off versus a purpose-built receive dongle is cost, power, and a heavier software stack.
How it works
The AD9361 is a complete 2x2 zero-IF transceiver on a chip: programmable synthesizers, mixers, baseband filters, and 12-bit converters, all tuned by the host. A Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA packetizes the streams to the host over USB 3.0. The sustained rate over USB tops out around 30.72 MS/s (≈56 MHz with the AD9361’s filters), well beyond what a single trunked system needs. Being zero-IF, it carries the usual DC-offset and I/Q-imbalance behaviour of that architecture — GopherTrunk’s DDC keeps the wanted channel off the DC spike, and a broadcast-FM notch filter still pays off in a strong-signal metro.
Variants and clones
- Ettus USRP B210 — the original (NI/Ettus), the reference against which the clones are measured; the B200 is the single-channel sibling.
- AD9361 “B210” clones — several vendors sell boards built to the B210 reference design (e.g. via opensourcesdrlab). In practice they are a strong value: for receive monitoring the difference from an original is negligible, at a fraction of the price. Firmware/UHD compatibility varies by vendor — confirm the seller supports the current UHD before buying.
Against a LimeSDR or BladeRF the B210 is the most mature of the AD9361/wideband-transceiver class in software support (UHD is ubiquitous); against an ADALM-Pluto it adds a second coherent channel and much wider bandwidth.
Relevance to SDR
GopherTrunk drives USRP hardware through UHD (see USRP (Ettus)).
The B210’s wide capture suits following a whole trunked system — or several control
channels — on one device via the role: wideband path, and its receive quality is well
above a dongle’s. As always it is a receiver for monitoring here: it decodes clear and
scrambled traffic, never keyed encryption, and its transmit capability is irrelevant to
scanning.
Where to buy
The original is sold by Ettus/NI (around $1,500). Functionally-equivalent AD9361 clones are far cheaper and widely available — e.g. opensourcesdrlab B210 (AD9361) — and on eBay/AliExpress. Confirm current UHD support with the seller.
Sources
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Ettus USRP B210 — Ettus Research (NI), on the B210’s AD9361 front end, 70 MHz–6 GHz range, up to 56 MHz bandwidth, 2x2 MIMO and USB 3.0 streaming. ↩